Female Bodybuilding

Lenda Murray, eight-time Ms. Olympia, the greatest female bodybuilder ever, seems to have a talent for dance too, as seen here in video taken at the 2009 Lenda Murray Bodybuilding Championships. Perhaps a stint on DWTS (which, boo! doesn't have a female athlete this season) is next?

If you watched women's Olympic downhill skiing yesterday, you understand why Emily Brydon and her fellow competitors might think such a thing. We saw again the awesome difference strength can make in sports, seemingly almost any sport. The Vancouver Sun makes clear what sets Lindsey Vonn apart:

The fact is, Vonn, an analytical perfectionist whose size and strength — she’s [5-10 and 165 pounds] — allows her to race on more forgiving men’s skis, is just too powerful, too innately talented to be caught when she’s on her game, shin bruise or not.

Congratulations to Lindsey Vonn and to Julia Mancuso!

When last we saw bodybuilder Kathy Bertram she was snapping a baseball bat. In today's bit of fun we find her doing dishes, that is, in her own eccentric strongwoman way:

Thanks to Under Armour, we get to see just how hard ski racer Lindsey Vonn is working to prepare herself for the 2010 Olympics. Here she is a role model for not only her hard work but her insight. Vonn gets it—she understands that you must build your body for your sport, and that starts in the gym, most often with strength training:

My little contribution to a "Best of '09" series by Women Talk Sports bloggers is a selection of favorites from this blog. I don't expect you'll find a particular mood or theme, less so a standard of quality, but rather, I hope, a few morsels that provoke reflection or simply entertain:

The story of Tina Lockwood

A Kind of Grace

Super shenanigans

Esther Williams

A lesson from the past

Athlete or sex symbol? A false dichotomy

A Wonder Woman of color?

Aneta Florczyk: setting records, inspiring women

Female Muscle: a little schooling for its detractors

Ruminating on the big fight

DC shakeup. The ugly paradox

The Body Issue

Advancing women's sports: largely a bootstrap process

Bridgett "Baby Doll" Riley and her art of violence


Happy New Year!


More "Best of '09" from other WTS bloggers:

Best of '09: Forming a community, WomenTalkSports.com

The "Best" of 2009 and the State of Girls & Women in Sports

Best of '09: A Fresh Meat’s Perspective

Best of '09 – A Year for Women in Wake

2009 Salute to Women in Sports

Victories and Failures in Women's Sports in 2009, or #FTW and #FAIL (Hot or Not for us old-timers)

Best of 2009: The Humble Emergence of Tanisha Wright

Best of the Best of 2009

Editor's note: We know that upper-body strength affords tangible athletic advantage in many, perhaps most, sports—even auto racing, strangely enough. This is of special importance to female athletes, who too often haven't been sufficiently encouraged and instructed in this mode of conditioning. Today's guest post by experienced bodybuilder and weightlifter Elle Nash aims to change that. I hope you find it useful.—Rob

Upper-body strength, an overview

Upper-body strength comes from mainly three areas: chest, back and core. There are other secondary muscles like the triceps, biceps and shoulders, but they really don’t provide the power that comes along with strength. The core is really the power spot because it will balance out your upper body and allow your other muscles to fully exert their strength. The core makes up your abdominal muscles, as well as the muscles in your lower back.

Exercises for upper-body strength

There are many different exercises that achieve this. There are things that you can do around the home, but the long term results are very limited. Pushups and pull ups work great, but there is a point where you’ll plateau. If you’re serious about getting more strength than you should be looking toward a gym membership or gym equipment.

Bench Press: You can do both barbell and dumbbell exercises of this. I like to mix it up week to week when I do this particular exercise. I find that the barbell bench press provides the most strength for the chest area. The dumbbells help work your stabilizer muscles and eventually help you get over plateaus.

Deadlifts: This is by far the best core exercise that you can do. I don’t even do sit ups or crunches anymore because they’re useless in my opinion. Lifting a barbell of weight off the floor requires an enormous amount of strength and really develops the core muscles, especially the lower back.

Bent Over Rows: You will also have the choice of using barbells and dumbbells for this one. I find value in both of them, so I switch it up week to week. This is going to develop strength in your upper back.

The exercises above are the main focus of your training for upper-body strength. They hit the biggest muscles in the upper body and they also work the secondary muscles in an indirect way. If you ever feel that your strength training is hitting a plateau than you should work your secondary muscles. This would include exercises like military press, triceps curls, biceps curls, seated rows, etc.

Diet for upper-body strength

As important as weight lifting is to developing strength, you also need to eat properly for the development of your muscles. The proper diet isn’t as complicated as most people assume. The hard part is just following it.

Since muscle tissue doesn’t build instantly, you have to constantly feed your system with protein. This is so your muscles always have nutrients available to them throughout the day. That doesn’t mean you have to eat all the time. The magic number is 4 hours. You should be getting a meal into you every 4 hours that contains protein. You’re not going to have big meals though. The idea here is to eat about 5-6 times a day instead of the usual 3.

With your body getting the necessary nutrition all the time, you’ll have the potential to repair muscle tissue properly and gain the upper-body strength you desire.

Resting

Most of the repairs done to your body will occur while you’re asleep, and if you’re not getting enough sleep they just won’t happen. This is why it is extremely important to get a full night of sleep, every night. If you’re someone that normally gets 5-6 hours a night than you’re going to have to bump it up to 8-9 hours a night.

I wish that strength training was all done in the gym, but you have to get the rest you need for your body to repair itself. After you start lifting heavy weights you’ll want to sleep more at a night.

This is everything you need to know on how to build upper-body strength as a female. Remember that results aren’t instant or fast. It takes time, so be patient and just keep working at it.

About the author: Elle Nash has been an amateur female bodybuilder for nearly 10 years. She has participated in many bodybuilding competitions around Canada. You can visit her website and blog on women's bodybuilding.

Reebok has a new line of shoes, and of course new commercials to promote them. Called Easytone, the shoes condition a woman's butt and legs, so we are told anyway. No gym. No workouts. Just wear shoes. Snake oil? Perhaps. But that's not what I'm concerned with today.

What bothers me is the image peddled to women as the ideal. A "toned" look suggests, to me and many others, I'm sure, an athletic physique. Maybe not a bodybuilder's, but manifestly athletic. What is presented instead, though, is the same soft, smooth, size 2 look we are informed constantly is the feminine ideal. Is this model's physique really much different from that seen in a thousand other advertisements?—



Contrasted with that of fitness athlete Jelena Abbou seen in this Fahrenheit commercial, it becomes obvious how paltry Easytone's "toned" look is:



In the Fahrenheit commercial we see a woman lucidly strong and athletic, yet strikingly attractive by any reasonable standard. Why can't there be more like this?

You have to admire 21-year-old bodybuilder Hayley McNeff (Facebook, MySpace). Her work ethic, her determination, her brazenness—model qualities for female athletes who truly want to excel:

Iris Kyle won her fifth Ms. Olympia last weekend. One doesn't risk much saying that she is this decade's dominant female bodybuilder. But has she been rewarded enough for her talent and hard work? Apparently not. Kyle was paid a meager $28,000 this year while the winner on the men's side got $200,000—a shocking discrepancy that leaves little doubt about how far we need to go before female athletes are justly compensated.

DC shakeup. No, not that DC. I refer here to DC Comics, which now has a new name—DC Entertainment—and a new president. This overhaul by parent company Warner Bros. bodes well for a forthcoming Wonder Woman film. Another sign that things are looking up for the Amazon: she now has her own forum at Comic Book Resources.

The ugly paradox. Caster Semenya's story, though regrettable, has at least given rise to worthwhile, occasionally enlightened, media commentary. Among the best I've seen is "Women in sports: The ugly paradox," a piece that throws into relief what is the nub of the story, and the bane of all female athletes: "They say the Semenya case shows that an old, ugly paradox is alive and well in women's sport: The same giant quadriceps and bulky shoulders that can clinch championships make athletes look 'unfeminine' in the eyes of the world. And that can be a difficult reality for many women."

Nasty as it was, Serena's tantrum at the US Open isn't as troubling as what she says about her arms in an interview for People: "I think they're too muscular. They're too thick," tennis champion Serena Williams said of her ripped arms in an Aug. 27 interview with People Magazine. "I know that toned arms are in now. Look at Michelle Obama. ... I'm like, 'keep wearing strapless dresses!' But I don't like mine."

Serena's is merely a representative case. The problem is in fact societal. That Serena sees her muscular physique as something better shunned isn't unusual. But when one of the world's most accomplished female athletes, ever, says as much in public, the fallacy is perpetuated—given life anew to burden the next generation of female athletes.

Sad it is to think that Serena apparently cannot reconcile her muscles with the women's fineries she sells on HSN; the same muscles, to continue the paradox theme, that helped make her a famous athlete, famous enough to have her own line of merchandise to peddle on a shopping network.

Seldom have I seen a rejoinder as plain-spoken and incisive as the ANC's to accusations that women's 800-meter world champion Caster Semenya is not a woman. I could not find or conjure up a better title for this post.

Caster Semenya earned a gold medal in Berlin yesterday by winning the 800-meter final rather handily. But, in timeworn fashion, there had to be controversy. Whenever a female athlete performs above expectations, especially if she has a muscular (often rendered artlessly as "masculine") build, you can bet there will be questions. Other recent victims of this include Cris "Cyborg" Santos and Dara Torres.

This sort of thing is nothing new, however, as Erik Siwak correctly points out. And "gender verification testing," which Semenya is now being subjected to, has its own long, sordid history: a realm where science begins to look rather like the dog chasing his tail.

Female athletes shouldn't have to contend with such nonsense. To my mind, the thinking that animates this holds back female athletes more than anything else. They sometimes curb their training, fearing ridicule or censure for a look that is too muscular. Worse yet, often these are the more talented athletes. How much better would they be if they weren't held back by outmoded nonsense?

The Semenya "controversy" can fairly be said to evince sexism, racism, and homophobia; but perhaps most of all, lunacy.

It isn't hard to find comments, online and elsewhere, that mock, disparage, or generally discount the idea of a woman with large muscles; a powerfully built woman, so it seems anyway, is at once an undesirable and an impossibility. Although the comments aren't all phrased the same way, all spring from the same few fallacies.

We often hear, for instance, that large muscles make women too much like men. Implicit in this thinking, of course, is the notion that muscles are the exclusive property of men. Yet such isn't a biological imperative, otherwise women would be utterly incapable of growing large muscles, which we know isn't true. Rather, this is merely a social construct; one horribly antiquated and useless (nay harmful).

Then, some say women are incapable of rivaling men in strength and other measures of athletic performance. These I call antievolutionists, because implicit in their thinking is that human biology is static and unchangeable. When in fact even our brains are malleable. (The brain is not only the most complicated organ, but also the one perhaps most responsible for production and regulation of hormones, including muscle-building hormones.) And if you think lasting physiological change results only from natural selection or breeding, well, that would be wrong too.

Women have been denied opportunities to flex their muscles for most of history. Should it surprise anyone, then, that there is ground to be made up? (The two exceptions we know of from history—Sparta and Dahomey—also give the lie to the naysayers' arguments.)

Nevertheless, now female athletes routinely do things that a generation or two ago no one thought possible.

Women adapt easily; they evolve more rapidly than men. (Could it be any other way?) Given time they will rise up and compete with men in athletics, as they do now in most other facets of life.

The quiet resolve shown by powerlifter Jessica Gallagher in the following video is typical of female athletes; why I foresee a day nearing when they will be formidable rivals to their male peers:

Alison Macleod says something in this interview that I find telling. When asked whether a female racer has an advantage or a disadvantage, Macleod mentions strength first: "Most girls are clearly disadvantaged when it comes to strength. Racing does require a lot of strength and lot of training so we have to work twice as hard as the guys do just to kind of keep that muscle up and everything, so we're at a little bit of a disadvantage."

So again we see how much strength training helps female athletes, even in sports where, at first glance, it wouldn't seem applicable, like auto racing.

I sometimes hear a female athlete say that she has cut back her weight training because it makes her look "too big," "too manly," etc. Moreover, often this is one of our exceptionally talented female athletes.

Strength is important (often decisive) in sport. Thus it is, to my mind, a pity that female athletes feel pressure, still in 2009, to conform to archaic ideals of femininity.

Perceptions are slowly changing, however. Society will grow up, eventually, but until then female athletes must carry on and lead the way.

This week is National Women's Health Week, which brought something to mind. Too often, when the subject of health comes up, the emphasis is on longevity. But quality of life is equally important.

The life extension resulting from a fit, strong body like that of 42-year-old Dara Torres may be uncertain, but the benefits during life are not. She can do things few others, much less anyone her age, can do, and feel terrific doing them. It almost goes without saying that part of our aesthetic appreciation for an athletic physique comes from deep within, from our understanding of how well it functions.

This is so according to findings from a recent study. Frankly, I am not surprised by the findings, and I suspect few who have given the matter much thought are.

Nevertheless, it would be hard to overstate the importance of this study to female athletes:

"I think the implications are that so many women are taking BCP, and if they are active or competing, and want to achieve the highest level of performance, they need to consider whether birth control is a negative influence on that," said senior investigator Steven Riechman, Ph.D., also of Texas A&M.

Keep in mind, too, that the type of oral contraceptive used made a difference: low-androgenicity pills may be a better option for female athletes.

Certainly something to consult your doctor about if you are an athletic woman.